


i'll see you on the road

by carmilla_unscripted



Category: Fear the Walking Dead (TV), The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Clexa, Crossover, F/F, Fluff, LGBT, Slow Burn, Smut, Soulmates, Zombie Apocalypse, canon bisexual, canon lesbian, lexark, reincarnation headcanon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-11
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-26 01:47:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6218764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carmilla_unscripted/pseuds/carmilla_unscripted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even streaked in dirt and clad in a tattered leather jacket, she is beautiful right away, to you.</p><p>Title taken from Traveling Song by Ryn Weaver</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. first

It’s a walker until it’s not. Then it’s a girl with blood on her shirt and trousers so tattered you can see her panties in places. But this is on the periphery because “not-a-walker” doesn’t mean _friend_ and you balance a kitchen knife between your thumb and fist.

She holds up her hands as soon as she sees the glint of the blade and says, “Whoa, chill,” in a voice somewhere between condescending and cautious and you have half a mind to stick her right between her ribs.

“Who are you?” you demand.

She smiles and slouches a little, like she’s decided you’re not worth it. “Chill, kid, I’m just passing through. You can thank me for putting that gang of walkers down the road out of their misery.”

“I’m not a kid,” you sneer, ignoring the first part. She doesn't know what you've seen. You can handle a few walkers. You know how to run in the opposite direction.

“Whatever, man, just put the knife away before you hurt someone. Drama queen,” she adds under her breath.

“Fuck you,” you snap, and now you really are going to stick her, but before either of you can make a move a voice calls out.

“Blake!”

The girl rolls her eyes. “For Chrissakes,” she mutters. “Over here!”

Forest growth rustles. It’s a second girl, blond and tall with steady eyes, and even streaked in dirt and clad in a tattered leather jacket she is beautiful right away, to you.

She's begun to chastise Blake for wandering off, but as soon as she sees you she backtracks, hoisting her shotgun and raising her eyebrows. "Who's this?" she asks.

"I was _getting_ to that when you interrupted me."

"Oh, calm your tits," the second girl says, rolling her eyes as she appraises you from head to toe. "Not bitten?" she checks. Your shake your head mutely. "Show me," she orders, and something in her voice makes it hard to refuse. You raise your arms to show her the bare pale skin and your bloodless clothes. She nods in satisfaction. "Alright then, cutie, where you comin from?"

"My mom," you start to say, and are shocked by the sound of your own voice saying those words. You'd tried not to think it, up till now. "My friends."

"Ah." Her eyes narrow in pity and you hate it, you hate the ball of tears in your throat and the way she looks at you.

"They're not bitten," you insist, wrapping your arms around your torso. "I just...can't find them right now."

"Join the club," Blake mutters, and the girl jabs her with the butt of her shotgun. "What the-what's wrong with you? Forget it, I'm heading back, you can deal with her yourself."

"You're not going anywhere," the girl insists, grabbing her arm. "You have the rifle." It's true, Blake wields a heavy, black gun, the kind you'd seen the soldiers use back in district twelve.

"So, let her die out here--one more walker for target practice."

" _Manners_ ," the girl snaps. She gives you a long-suffering look. "You'll have to forgive her, cutie."

The conversation is happening too fast. You aren't sure whether they want to kill you or save you. It's two against one and they look strong and fast.

And yet--the blond girl's wearing a flirty, crooked grin as she reaches out to you and says, "Elyza."

When she grips your forearm your flesh grows goosebumps at the warmth and weight of her hand. It's the first human contact you've had in a week. "L-Alicia."

You look down into her eyes. You've stammered over your own name. You feel like there's something else you have to say, but you're tired and the road's been shit, the last thing you ate was a twinkie you found at an abandoned daycare center, and you wish your brother was here so you could crack a joke about processed snacks and the apocolypse.

"What're we doing with her, boss?" Blake demands.

"Well," Elyza considers. "We could use a pretty girl in our crew," she says, emphasis on the _pretty_ as she winks at you over Blake's "fuck you". Your face is dirty enough to conceal your blush, but she smirks in satisfaction. "C'mon, cutie," she says, holding onto your arm gently enough that you know you'd be able to pull away if you wanted to. "I think we're having pie for dinner. If you scrape the mold off the top it tastes pretty good."

"I can't," you start to say. "My mom. I have to--" 

"It's just one pie," she says, and her voice is soft and lilts over the words. You are warm all the way down in your stomach. Her eyes are blue and so, so clear, and she is not smiling but something like it. 

You shrug helplessly. You nod. You're starving.

It's been a long time since you had pie. 

Elyza leads you down a crude path through the woods while Blake takes look-out at the rear. You learn they have a camp at the neighboring farmhouse, a whole group of them that includes Blake's brother, Bo. You learn there’s a gang of walkers hanging around the school a couple of miles down the road and there’s talk of soldiers in the area, big hulking men who don’t ask questions before shooting. There’s the heavy weight of a knife in your boot, and the girls cradle the guns in their arms. Your heart rockets a little, because you are at war, all of you and sometimes you forget even though it's always a shadow in the back of your mind. 

Elyza explains that they come from a beach town and were clubbing in a seaside bar when the walkers staggered down the boardwalk. They’ve been together ever since, on the hunt for their misplaced families. She says all this mechanically, in a way that makes you think she has told this story often, to her friends and to strangers and in her dreams at night. 

You like listening to her talk. It's like something from a dream. Her words are dangerous and sad and a testament to all the horrors you've seen, but you don't hear them so much as the deep, attrative timbre her voice.

You walk in silence for a while. At one point you take too long crossing a stream and Blake prods you in the back with her rifle. _This bitch_. You whirl around and see her smirk. “Do you have a problem?” you demand, whole body poised towards her, and you feel muscles rippling in your arms and back that didn’t used to be there.

“Alicia,” you hear. Elyza says your name in gentle warning.

Not Blake. _Alicia_. She’s soft and tired and pleading. She says your name like she knows everything that’s happened and she wouldn’t even stop you if you tackled Blake to the ground right now to settle this for good—but like maybe, if you didn’t, then she would close her eyes and relax and take you through the woods with its little yellow leaves glowing in sunlight, and you could hear her talk more.

You stop. Take a breath. “Whatever,” you mutter and keep walking.

Listening is a first for you. 

_finite_


	2. name

Elyza Lex is her full name. You laugh. “What kind of name is that?” 

She pushes you and you nearly tumble down the embankment into the stream. 

“Who told you that?” she growls. Her voice drops when she’s annoyed, accent melting in pools down your spine. The two of you sit close enough that you are shocked from the static of her soft blond arm hair. 

“Jasper,” you admit. 

“I’m gonna kill him,” she mutters, fiddling with the shotgun sitting in the dirt by her side.

“Alright, Lex Luthor,” you tease, and she gives you a blank look.

“Clarke Kent,” you hint. Nothing. “Ya know, Superman.”

“You're a nerd.” She rolls her eyes, smiling a little, which is a rarity for her. You bask in the little rays of light she gives off when she grins. Your heart grows warm. You are helpless and stupid and out of control with her. You feel all these dangerous things. 

“I’m not the one who looks like she came out of a spy movie,” you retort after a moment. “Seriously, leather pants in the apocalypse?”

“Hey! They’re very—what’s the word? Aerodynamite.”

You snort. “Aerodynamic. Didn’t you ever take basic earth science? Or like, watch Bill Nye?”

She looks again as though she’s lost the reference, but she must get the gist because she raises an eyebrow, teasing you with just the glint in her eyes, and you don't know how you've learned to read her so well in so little time. Then she shrugs and chews on a stalk of grass, looking out over the farm. “Nah. I went to spy school,” she says so casually you almost believe her.

“So that’s why you’re so good with a gun.” 

She winks. “That’s what all the girls say.”

You giggle—fucking _giggle_ , and you are so totally lost with her, but you stay cool and stretch out on your back by her side, enjoying the last of the summer sunshine on your arms. Elyza sits with one leg stretched out and the other pulled to her chest. She’s balanced on one hand; the other is flung casually over her knee. She hasn’t removed her shades or jacket. 

She looks—god, she looks hot. Fucking _spy school_. “Ugh.”

“Hmm?” she says, scanning the trees.

“Nothing. Where does the name Elyza come from?” you ask.

She doesn’t talk about her childhood with the others, but she’ll tell things to you. She studies her knee and scrapes her hand through the dirt, a very, very small smile on her face. “My dad.”

“Oh.”

Her friends still talk about their parents in the present tense, but Elyza doesn’t mention hers at all. When they reminisce over canned beans at dinner, she stays silent and lets them have their memories. 

“What was—is, he like?” you ask.

She presses your arm to let you know it’s ok. “He died two years ago,” she says. 

“Oh.” Your heart thumps. You share this with her then—dead fathers. No one else understands. They’ve lost lots of people to walkers, but you’re supposed to expect that, these days. It’s war. It’s the goddamn apocalypse. But your father wasn’t supposed to die. There wasn’t a good enough reason for it.

“He was a biologist at UCLA,” Elyza explained. “He predicted the virus, the apocalypse—all this.” She gestures to the ruins of the farm below them, the abandoned barn and chicken coop, the fields of weeds and toppled fences. “He wanted to inform the public. The—the authorities didn’t like that. The official story is a heart attack.” 

You press one finger to her thigh in a comforting gesture. She squints down at you. Her eyes are a little leaky but you don’t say so. You sit up so that your noses almost touch and her hair breaks like a wave around you. Her breath shudders on your lips. A weight presses down on your gut and your body feels thick and heavy and slow. You think there’s something that you ought to know. The words to comfort her? But you don’t know them, you never have, not for her father, or yours, or Matt. 

You jerk your head away and look up at the sky. “This sounds dumb,” you say, even though you know it's not, because the tears in your throat are real. You just have to protect yourself from her, for now. “But I feel like I’ve heard it before.”

She frowns. “Heard what?”

“Your name.”

“Yeah,” she scoffs, and the spell is broken, the sensation passing like déjà vu. “This morning when Monty and Jasper were nagging me about breakfast. And the twenty times Blake yelled through the bathroom door till I got out.”

You close your eyes and let the breeze wash over your face. A smile plays on your lips. “I’m serious, Elyza,” you say. Her name tastes beautiful when you say it. You’ve seen the way she spells it, with the funny ‘y’ instead of ‘i’, and you’ve teased her for that, too. 

“I’m sure you are.”

You whack her. “Don’t be as asshole.” She laughs you off. You let the sound wash over you and track the lines of the laugh over her face, settling on a streak of dirt at the corner of her mouth. God, does the girl ever _bathe_? 

“I mean…before we met," you confess quietly.

A thoughtful look passes over her, and she leans back onto her elbows, relaxing more fully. You switch positions instantly, sitting up so you can keep watch. You don’t have to say it. The two of you have this sort of rhythm. 

You can tell she really has taken you seriously this time, but before she can respond there’s a shout from the farmhouse. You look down the hill and see a stooped, staggering walker emerge from the tree-line and make its way towards Monty, who drops the pitcher of water he’s carrying and scrams for the house. 

Elyza curses. “Jesus Christ, I leave them alone for one second…” She’s off, hurdling down the hill, already jerking the safety on her shotgun. You run after her, fingering the cold weight of your knife, but you know it won’t be necessary, and by the time you’re halfway down the hill Elyza has blown the walker’s head off. She lights a match from the box in her pocket and throws it on the body. A group of teenagers watches from the porch. “Fucking useless without me,” she mutters all the while, rearranging her hair and straightening her jacket.

“Dropped something,” you say, retrieving her shades from the grass. 

She slides them up over her head. “Thanks, babe.”

You are not her babe. You're not anyone's babe, at the moment. But your stomach goes absolutely out of control when she calls you this. “Alright,” she calls to the kids on the porch. “Show’s over, go do your chores or something. Be useful.”

“Tyrant,” you accuse.

“You know it.” She slings her arm over your shoulder and leads you towards the woods. “Let’s go make sure there’s no more of those creeps lurking around.” You go with her willingly. You’re silent for a while, scanning the underbrush and picking your way through nettles. 

At one point, she says, “You know what it feels like?” 

And you know she’s answering your question, from before. 

“It feels like I’ve known you all along.” 

_finite_


	3. gun

“D’you actually know how to use that thing?” Elyza asks one day, while you fiddle with the handgun she’s given you. It’s not loaded.

You look at her defensively. “Why wouldn’t I?” 

Elyza shrugs. “I dunno. Just seems every time there are walkers around you leave the shooting to someone else.”

You quiver and feel your cheeks burn. “I do not,” you retort. 

Elyza shrugs good-naturedly and bumps your shoulder. She’s been doing that a lot lately, touching you. Your arm tingles. “I’m just saying,” she said. “I could teach you, if you wanted.”

The next morning, the two of you end up on the grassy knoll above the farm. You stare at the sun as it pierces the dewy wet fields. “We’ll have to leave here soon,” Elyza admits. “They’re closing in.” 

You don’t want to think about abandoning your little oasis of green and calm. Not yet. “Show me how to hold this,” you say.

“First check to see if it’s loaded.”

You look at her in exasperation. “It’s not.”

“You have to check.” She’s got her arms crossed, watching you.

You release the cylinder and rotate it pointedly in front of her face. All empty. “See?”

“Yeah, I see.” There’s something in her voice. You turn around and look at her. She’s staring at your chest. 

“Perv!” you cry, punching her arm. It’s all muscle and probably hurts you more than her. 

She grins, the picture of innocence in her ridiculous black get-up. Fucking flirt. You're not sure why you like it; why you let her get away with it. Her thighs ripple beneath her leather pants. “Ok, now show me how you stand.”

You sigh and straighten your back and shoulders out of their customary slouch, parting your legs and extending your arms. The gun’s black nozzle disappears from your line of vision but its cold weight seems to sink in your hands. Sweat shivers on your temple. You could kill with this. You could blast a walker’s face off the way you’ve seen Elyza do.

It takes you a moment to register her laughter. Its takes you longer to realize she’s laughing at you. “What did I do?” you demand.

She covers her mouth. “Sorry,” she mumbles. “You look like something out of an old Western.”

Your face blazes in embarrassment. “You’re the one who wanted to do this,” you say, nearly thrusting the gun into her hands and marching away. 

Before you realize what’s happening her body is curved around yours and she’s cupping your hands over the gun. “I’m sorry,” she promises. “I’m sorry. It’s cute. Here. I’ll show you.” 

It’s not the gun you feel now, or the ground beneath your feet. She’s practically spooning you. Her breasts line up with your shoulders, her crotch with the curve of your backside. You breathe her and it’s like you’ve done this a thousand times, your bodies lining up in perfect synchronization. Her closeness allows you to feel, and feeling brings the pain and makes you want to cry. You smell her dirt and her sweat and feel the coarseness of her hair on your cheek. 

You break away. “I’m sorry.” Your voice cracks over each syllable. “I can’t do this.”

“Alicia,” she breathes. At first she starts to follow you, but when you retreat, she gives you space.

She sends Monty to keep an eye on you. He doesn’t say explicitly that she gave him this directive, but when he pretends to stumble upon you by accident in the middle of an old cow pasture, you know. 

In another life you’d be annoyed that she doubts your ability to take care of yourself, but Monty isn’t bad company. Mostly he’s silent, but sometimes he’ll comment on vegetation that’s overtaken the land now that the farmers are no longer around to plow it. You know a thing or two about biology and give him your two cents. He looks surprised that you’re actually paying attention and you send him a small smile. 

“I was supposed to go to Berkely,” you admit. He looks at you with a new kind of respect.

 _Berkeley_. Your beacon of hope through middle and high school and the fall out of your father’s death and Travis’s arrival into the place he’d abandoned. You think of Matt and how determined he was to follow you wherever you decided to go. And that leads to the memory of his dying body, scarred with bites marks. How he sent you away to save you. How he loved you.

Pain blasts a hole in your heart. You don’t want to think anymore. You don’t want to feel or remember all the lifetimes of hurt you’ve known in less than a year. Forgetting Monty, you sit down in the middle of the field, decaying cow dung all around you, and bury your face in your arms. You’ll never see your mom again. You know that now. You’ll never eat popsicles with Chris or coax your lousy brother out of the bathroom when he’s in a slump or even admit to Travis how ‘not-so-bad’ he really was. 

You hear Monty's voice asking if you're alright, trying to comfort you in a clumsy way, but once you ignore him long enough he leaves. 

You don’t know how long you sit there or when you start crying. All you know is that the hurt has to go somewhere and it bubbles up out of you in soggy wetness and you hate it.

After a while, arms loop around your shoulders and you don’t have to see to know it’s Elyza. You know her smell and her body. In a thousand lifetimes, you’d know it. It is so distinctly hers. “Where’s Monty?” you croak.

“Never mind,” she shushes, rocking you gently. “Never mind.” 

You sniffle and push into her side. She gets down on her knees and cradles you against her body. You forget that you are afraid of the things she makes you feel. Right now you feel safe. 

Something cold and metal presses into your leg and you realize the gun is still tucked in your pant leg. You rest your forehead on her shoulder for one more moment and then slip the weapon from its sheath. You look up into her eyes. They remind you of something, you’re not sure. In the midst of violence and war and pain, she is the thing you hold onto. You shudder at the intensity of those feelings. They’ve happened so fast, but they seem natural, like something you’ve always known.

You fold her hands over the gun. This is her gift to you; the gift of protection. “Show me again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alternative title: idk about guns so i have to write around the gun scene by making characters confront emotional pain


	4. savior

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The pressure of the gun, once heavy and intimidating, is now a reassuring shield in your hands.

The walkers descend on the farmhouse one morning as you’re returning from a raid in town. You’ve slept on the floor of a deli and your shoulders ache; dark circles crowd under Elyza’s eyes, but her entire body jerks in horror when she hears the cries of her friends. 

You know what she’s going to do a second before she leaps into action, sprinting towards the horde of walkers instead of away. “You _idiot_ ,” you grit through clenched teeth, hesitating only a moment to process your dismay and your fear before running in pursuit. 

You grasp for her but she’s too fast and too frantic. You’re afraid to yell her name in case it attracts those glassy dead eyes, but she needs to stop and you need to communicate that to her somehow. 

The horde stretches like a storm-cloud all the way down the road. They’re coming from the direction of the high school; they’ve broken through the gate somehow, finally. Blake, who patrols the area every morning, had estimated you had a few more days to move on. 

When she’s about fifty yards away, Elyza stops long enough to adjust her shotgun and shoot haphazardly at the line of the dead. “Hey, bastards!” she yells, hoarse with fear for her friends. A rush of heat spreads through your gut at the rasp of her voice and damnit, this is not the time. 

She’s too far away to hit a mark, but that’s not the point; she’s trying to distract them with the sound of gunfire. Redirect their attention to her. Idiot. 

“Elyza,” you gasp, jerking her several steps away from the walkers before she manages to shrug you off. “We have to go,” you plead. Her plan has worked, sort of. A wave of walkers has set its sights on the two of you. The rest drive their ragged bodies towards the house. 

She sets off several more bullets. Your own gun is tucked into your jeans but you’re a clumsy shot on the best days. 

“Ammo, more ammo,” Elyza grits, and you understand, diving for the pack on her shoulders and reaching for a box of rounds in the front pocket. You take them in your shaking hands and somehow transfer them to hers, staring at the methodical loading of the gun that she completes with astonishing composure. “Get behind me, Alicia,” she orders.

You stand at her back, clutching the box full of shiny metal bullets. You’re terrified and frozen. You’re certain you both are dead. There’s dozens of them bearing down you. 

She fells the first onslaught in spurts of blood. Blake is yelling orders from the house but you can’t understand them. They’re not for you. She’s taken charge, rallying her meager troops in defensive lines on the second floor. Your ears ring in the echo of gunfire like the surround-sound of a Michael Bay action thriller.

Michael Bay is probably chowing down on _filet_ of brain right now. You sob a laugh. 

“A little help here, cutie,” Elyza grunts. You shuffle more ammo into her hands. “No,” she snaps as she fires off another shot. “I mean with our company—they’ve outlived their welcome, don’t you think?”

“Technically, they haven’t outlived anything,” you hear yourself saying. 

Elyza stops firing long enough to stare at you in amazement. Someone, somewhere, in a psychology textbook that is now useless, probably wrote in length about the benefits of humor as a coping mechanism. 

She grins for the briefest of seconds before composing herself. Grits her teeth. “Just do like I taught you.”

The gun from your jeans is cool and your fingers slide over its ridges to turn off the safety. You’re at point blank range. You aim and shoot a string of bullets. The human head is a smaller target than you expected and several miss their marks, but you slow their progress so Elyza has time to reload and fire the kill shots. She’s working quickly and efficiently now, letting off each round with satisfying pops while you cover her from the side. The pressure of the gun, once heavy and intimidating, is now a reassuring shield in your hands. 

A sound, or lack thereof, registers on the periphery of the struggle. You hear the echoes of only two gunshots, where before there had been a dozen at least, rebounding back and forth between your position and the farmhouse. You’re not sure Elyza realizes Blake and her crew have gone silent, as intent as she is on clearing a path between you and them. Walkers swarm like bees, mouths torn to pieces, clothes shredded, limping on two limbs or one. 

You yank Elyza back from the brink of the horde and her bullet goes wide. A walker lurches forward and grabs her by the arm, and for a moment she is ripped away from you into the crowd and you cannot see anything except the possibility of Elyza being gone. 

You go cold from it. Your veins turn to ice and the ice slows time. 

White, searing heat splits your vision and plugs up the hole in your heart and your body is filled with a sensation of nothingness, or loss, or the absence of something that had been there before, _and Clarke stares back at you in betrayal because you failed her and now she is going to die, wild, reckless girl, because she does not belong to herself; she made that pact with the world long ago_.

The walker clunks to the ground with a heavy jolt. You stare at your pistol, which has not been fired; you clutch it in your hands like a club. The walker’s skull has been brutally battered in, so that his eyes are crushed into his sockets. You gag, but Elyza’s touch shocks you into action. “Move it,” she grunts. “To the water tower.” 

You leave the battle field with its array of bodies that are dead twice over, and make for the water tower looming in the distance, at the edge of town. The walkers still animated are no match for either of you at top speed and you have plenty of time to climb the ladder and close the hatch. 

There’s a platform inside for maintenance workers and you crouch there together. The echo of water against the sloped metal sides comes gently through the dark and cold. Many times you imagine you hear walkers outside, but the ladder can only fit one person at a time, so the hatch can’t be forced open by the combined weight of the undead. 

Elyza fiddles with her walkie-talkie but all she gets is static, until finally she launches it at the wall, where it bounces with a hollow clang. “It’s useless,” she shouts. 

“Don’t say that,” you whisper, reaching for her hand. It’s wrapped in cloth where she’d cut her palm on rusty metal during a raid. 

“It’s my fault,” she croaks. “We should’ve left here ages ago. I waited too long. I got—complacent, I went soft…” She struggles for the words and your heart aches for her. You're afraid of what has has happened to those children in that house, but you are more relieved that she is here with you. 

With your thumbs you trace the calloused lines of her palm. You rub soothing circles until her muscles start to relax beneath you—when you look into her face you see she has deflated. 

“Blake could’ve gotten them out,” you say. Not to reassure her. Not even because you’re half-convinced this is true. Only because this is something Blake is capable of, and so it is not a falsehood. You would never lie to her. You couldn’t. 

She can’t save everyone. 

You will not tell her that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alternate title; a wild plot appears

**Author's Note:**

> writing tiny fics bc they’re fun and i need distractions sometimes. also: coping mechanisms. there's another chapter coming tomorrow. (don’t watch twd or ftwd so pardon if some of this is inaccurate) 
> 
> follow @ steampunklesbian-novel.tumblr.com


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